Electronic devices, such as smartphones, are part of daily lives and have quickly become go-to devices, allowing users to accomplish many tasks with a simple tap and swipe such as, for example, making payments by “mobile wallets.” “Mobile wallets” refer to digital versions of real wallets that may contain multiple relationship cards. The term “relationship card,” or simply “card”, as used herein may refer to any physical card product that is configured to provide information, such as financial information (e.g., card numbers, account numbers, etc.), quasi-financial information (e.g., rewards balance, discount information, etc.) and/or individual-identifying information (e.g., name, address, etc.), when the card is read by a card reader. Examples of such cards include credit cards, debit cards, gift cards, rewards cards, frequent flyer cards, merchant-specific cards, discount cards, identification cards, membership cards, and driver's licenses, but are not limited thereto.
To add a card to a mobile wallet, the card must be imaged and digitalized. Conventional approaches for imaging and digitizing cards generally involve edge detection techniques by measuring brightness changes of card images, for example to detect whether the image brightness changes sharply (i.e., brightness discontinuities). However, many cards, such as gift cards, loyalty cards, and credit card, may contain magnetic stripes and/or colorful art work. For example, a magnetic stripe may be located at the top or bottom of a card, and may contain valuable information both below and above the magnetic stripe. For such cards, the conventional approaches may not be able to detect true edges of the cards. Therefore some valuable information of the cards may not be correctly captured.
The present disclosure is directed to addressing one or more of the problems set forth above and/or other problems associated with conventional imaging of cards.